Install New Hard Drive - Performance

[banda-1]

Hello everyone.

I have a 10Gb hard drive on my primary IDE controller. I have a Liteon LTR-32123s (Master) and a Creative 40X CD-ROM on the secondary IDE controller.

My question: If I install another hard drive (probably 10Gb) on the Primary Controller, will it affect the performance of my ystem. I mean, will it create a bottleneck, slowing down the primary hard drive, or even the cd-drives?

The main reason I want to install this other drive is to backup information using a backup scheduler running every 4 hours, including adding CD-ROM image files to it, so it may get to be filled
to the MAX (10Gb).

I am using Windows 98se on a Pentium III with 128 Mb of Memory.

Thank You!

[Truman]

Yes and No. It depends on which are being used.

Slave and master takes turn in using the cable, so for example, if you are copying a file from your primary hard disk to your other hard disk (which is connected to the same cable) then it would be fairly slow - this will slow down your system.

Here’s a recommendation

If you are planning to copy a lot from harddisk to harddisk then put them on separate cables, i.e. connect 1 HD to CDROM and the other HD to the writer.

If you are going to be copying a lot from CDROM to HD and only a few small files from HD to HD then your mentioned setup is okay.

If you can’t live with this then you could try getting an IDE Raid card.

[banda-1]

What is an IDE Raid card?
And what benefits and functions
does it have?

Thank You!

[Truman]

IDE Raid card is a PCI card that gives you 2 extra IDE slots.

It also has the advantage of:

1. increasing performance of reading/writing data to/from HD, by allowing 2, 3 or 4 HDs to spread the data across the HDs - it’s like parallel-processing where more than 1 CPU is used, except this is with HDs and just data transfers instead.

or

2. automatic backup and allowing for corrupt data due to bad sectors to be restored.

[banda-1]

Thank You! Mr. Truman